by Kailin Gow
“So what are you saying?” Wirt asked.
Alana shook her head. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I just know that I want both of you to come through this all right.” She leaned forward to kiss Wirt’s cheek. “Like I said, I don’t think I could stand to see either of you hurt. I’d do anything to stop that from happening.”
She walked out, and Wirt stood there dumbfounded. The situation was turning into a mess. Had Alana really just told him that she would have been his if only he had made it clear just how much he cared about her? If only he’d fought for her? That thought was a crushing one, and it meant that when the door started to open again, Wirt said it automatically, eager not to waste his chance as Alana came back.
“I care about you too, a lot.”
He looked up to see Robert there, smirking. “Well, that’s good to know Wirt, and it’s very flattering, but I’m afraid I prefer girls.”
“Oh, sorry,” Wirt said, reddening slightly in embarrassment. “I thought you were someone else.”
“Alana?” Robert said it in such a neutral way, but Wirt knew how many problems admitting it might cause. Robert had already told him what he felt about her, and that part of his reason for not choosing Spencer as an advisor was Spencer’s involvement with her. Yet Wirt couldn’t help how he felt. Not with the girl who was the most beautiful to him of any in school telling him that she cared about him too.
“Oh, I know you can’t help it,” Robert said. “You know she’s off-limits, but you can’t help what you feel about her.” He sighed. “Join the club. Now, I was rushing back to tell you something, but what was it? Oh, of course. I was just going to say that I’d overheard some of the elite class students talking about the Games. Apparently, they’re going to be involved, using their experiences as part of the tests to make them more applicable to the real world, so maybe you can use that to help you.”
“How?” Wirt asked.
Robert shrugged. “I don’t know. Which one of us is the advisor here?”
“Thanks,” Wirt said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
He tried not to let Robert see how nervous he was until they turned in for the night. He wasn’t sure how good a job he did though. Everyone seemed to know more about the Quantum Games than he did, yet it was his life at stake if things went wrong there. Wirt tried not to think about that as he drifted off into sleep, though that just meant that his mind drifted over to Alana instead. He fell asleep with the deep green of her eyes looking at him in his dreams.
Chapter 12
Morning came, and Wirt found himself collected by Ms. Burns, who took him down to the meadows in front of the school, where everyone was waiting. “Everyone” in this case meant all the pupils and staff of the school, plenty of parents, King Wilfred and Spencer’s father included, plus an array of magic mirrors that suggested the whole thing was being broadcast across the Hundred Kingdoms.
Walking down towards it, it looked a bit to Wirt like a school sports day, with flags marking out a competition area, stands for the parents, and the headmaster sitting right at the front, officiating. Except that for today, there were only two other competitors, both standing at the start of what looked like a running track marked out on the grass. Neither Spencer nor Roland met Wirt’s eye as he made his way down to the start. Spencer was stretching. Roland was standing there with that strange lead box of his sitting on the grass not far away, like a lucky charm.
“Now that we are all here,” Ender Paine said, standing, “I would like to welcome everyone around us to the Quantum Games. These three students seek entrance to our school’s elite class, but only one place remains in it. They will compete for that place. After the first few rounds, we will eliminate one of the contestants from the competition, assuming that the tests do not eliminate them in a more permanent way. Then the two remaining will compete with the quantum ball until we have a victor.”
The headmaster turned to face the stand. “There are those who say that this tradition is barbaric, but I say that it is part of what helps to keep our school strong, and that all three young men have shown the kind of drive and ambition we want in this school by putting their lives on the line. Our first contest is a simple one.”
Ender Paine began to chant, and so did several of the other teachers. The ground in front of Wirt started to shake, and suddenly it burst apart, so that a high wall appeared in front of him. Looking beyond it, he could see a pit filled with flames, a wide trench filled with water, and other obstacles. Many seemed to involve either fire or sharp edges.
Ender Paine waved a hand, and there was silence. “The first student to the end of the course, or the last student able to continue, is the victor. Begin.”
Wirt hadn’t expected it to start so simply, so he was almost caught off guard as Roland and Spencer raced forward. Wirt sprinted after them, leaping at the wall and clambering over it. Or starting to, anyway. It was only as he got to the top that he realized it was somehow far taller on the far side than on the one he’d come from, so that there was a drop of nearly twenty feet. Roland appeared to have coped with that somehow, because he was already sprinting away towards the next obstacle, while Spencer was climbing down the wall using a rope he had conjured.
Wirt found himself remembering the time Ms. Burns had pushed him from the tree, and leaped, summoning up all the water he could below him. He landed with a splash in a deep pool, then dragged himself clear. A second splash behind him told him that Spencer had let go of his rope.
Wirt hurried forward, towards the pit filled with fire, over which there was a thin bridge. Roland had already crossed it, and glanced back, smiling as he did so. His lips moved in a spell, and suddenly the pit flared, becoming a wall of flames. There was no way that Wirt would be able to use the bridge to cross now. Anger rose in him. It wasn’t enough that Roland was ahead, he had to cheat too?
Well, they would see about that. Wirt reached into himself for his transportation skills and blinked the short distance across the flaming pit. Then he ran to catch Roland, glancing back just long enough to see Spencer conjuring up a fire hose to spray the flames into submission. By that point though, Wirt was busy concentrating on what came next. Roland seemed to be moving slower than he had been. Much slower in fact. So slowly that…
Wirt reacted, but not in time. One moment he was running along quickly, the next he seemed to be sprinting through a hall of mirrors, with his own reflection on every side. Each mirror seemed to have a handle, so it was obviously a door too, and Wirt tried one at random. It just led him through to more mirrored doors. He tried another one, but it only had the same effect. For a moment, Wirt panicked, not knowing what to do, but then he started to think.
It couldn’t be real, could it? It had to be some kind of illusion, or trick, or something. All he needed to do was prove that to himself. So he extended his senses the way he had in practice with Ms. Burns, reaching out to try to feel something beyond the mirrors. Distantly, Wirt thought he could hear the roar of a crowd, and see a set of hanging spiked chains in front of him, but it was like something half remembered. Wirt forced himself to concentrate.
The world around him came into focus with a snap, and Wirt was surprised to see that Roland was still struggling with the obstacle. Wirt decided to sprint forward, pressing the advantage, but he’d barely gone a few steps before he heard Roland casting a spell behind him. Something sprang up around Wirt, and he realized after a moment that it was a freezing shell of ice. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t even breathe. He could still transport himself though, so he blinked from the inside of the shell to the outside, watching it collapse in on itself before setting off after Roland.
The spiked chains were hard. Especially when Roland set them swinging. Wirt had to pick his way between them carefully, timing each movement to avoid them. By the time he was through, Roland was already running again, and crossing the water filled trench using a spell to let him walk on the surface. He seemed to be concentrating on another spell too, using
a greenish shield of light to push down at something on the surface. Wirt saw his chance to catch up. He glanced back and saw that Spencer was past the mirror trap now, and his friend seemed to be making good progress with the chains, because when it came to calculating angles, there was nobody better than Spencer.
Wirt threw himself into the water, not caring now if his clothes got wet. He started to swim out after Roland, and it was only when he got about halfway across the trench that he realized why Roland wasn’t doing the same. Mostly because, at that point, a large tentacle shot up from the water and wrapped around him. The strength of the thing almost crushed the air from him and Wirt reacted on instinct, casting a spell that had caused far too much trouble for him in his first days there.
The world seemed to grow around him, but Wirt knew that was actually because he’d shrunk. Specifically, he’d shrunk to the size of a frog small enough to slip from the grasp of the squid lurking below and dart away through the water. Wirt saw the many tentacled thing there, swimming after him, and raced for the opposite bank. He leapt from the water, grateful that this time he had only used the temporary version of the spell and was growing back up to his old self.
Roland was well ahead by now, past what looked like traditional elements of an obstacle course in the form of a tire run, a crawl under netting, and a journey down a rope slide. As Wirt quickly learned though, even those weren’t straightforward. As he tentatively put his foot in the first tire, he saw it shimmer and disappear, stepping into a space that had nothing to do with the school and where there could have been anything.
As for the net, that dropped down on him almost as soon as he was under it, wrapping him up as though it were alive. Wirt reacted with flames this time, singing it until it rolled itself up out of his way in pain. He made it to the rope slide and started to hook himself up to it when he saw Roland at the other end. What was he doing now?
Wirt discovered the answer to that once he was halfway across and Roland set light to the rope. It stretched, and snapped, and would have deposited Wirt in a pool of what looked suspiciously like acid if he hadn’t transported himself back to the safety of the starting point. From there, he had to control the air around the rope tightly to hold it still long enough to get to the far bank. By then, Roland was already running for the finish.
Wirt sprinted after him, straining every sinew as he tried to overtake the other boy. By that time though, Roland simply had too much of a head start. Wirt tried to catch him, and even started to make up ground, but he was too far away for it to do any good. By the time Wirt had made it a quarter of the way there, Roland had already run through the finishing tape.
Wirt ran up there after him, to the spot where Ender Paine was holding Roland’s arm aloft.
“Parents, students, and watching figures, we have a victor in our first task. Roland Black.”
“He cheated!” Wirt yelled before he could stop himself. Every eye in the place turned to him. Frankly, next to the glare the headmaster gave him, none of them were very impressive.
“What do you think you are doing,” Ender Paine demanded. “Why do you think that you can interrupt me while I am congratulating the winner of a race in which you are one of the losers?”
“Roland won because he cheated,” Wirt said again. “He used his magic to hinder both me and Spencer. He almost killed me back on that rope.”
“True,” the headmaster said.
“So aren’t you going to disqualify him, or something?” Wirt demanded.
Ender Paine smiled. “Why ever would I do that?”
“But…”
“Silence,” the headmaster said. “This is a contest between potential elite members of our school, not a child’s game. Roland Black has not directly broken any of the rules of the tournament, and in life, a man of true power does what he must to succeed. I saw you using magical transportation several times on the course. If you had thought, you could have transported yourself to the end quite easily, but you chose not to. Why not?”
“Because I thought…” Wirt hesitated “…well, it didn’t seem… fair.”
“Then you have learned a valuable lesson in the stupidity of fairness,” Ender Paine said. “The result stands. Roland Black is the victor here. Wirt Newton is second. Spencer Bentley is last. I will hear no arguments. Now, the events are over for the day. Those students with lessons should go to them. There will be more tests in the morning.”
Chapter 13
The hardest part was still having lessons after spending the morning running through a potentially deadly obstacle course. Given the way some of the lessons at the school went, the contrast perhaps wasn’t quite as great as it might have been in some other places, but it still felt strange to Wirt that he should have to accompany Robert to a lesson on political theory so soon after almost being eaten by a giant squid. There were some things, he suspected, that should get people out of classes.
Apparently not though, so Wirt had to sit through a lecture on the idea of a ruler doing the most good for their subjects possible, while working with Robert on exercises designed to explore the balancing act of a kingdom. The tutor seemed a little exasperated by Robert’s insistence that the best way to produce happiness in subjects was to tell them jokes. So much so that he barely seemed to notice when Robert came up with quite a good idea in an exercise on grain distribution based around the idea of a starving kingdom.
Eventually though, the lessons finished. Wirt headed off to one of the student common rooms, hoping to maybe see Alana there. After everything she had said the previous day, he wanted to talk to her so much. He had so many things to say, and this time he wanted to say them to her, rather than blurting them out accidentally to Robert. She was nowhere to be found though. Even in the lessons earlier, she and Priscilla hadn’t been present, apparently being off doing the kind of lessons in magic that Priscilla wanted to do so much.
It seemed that she wasn’t here either. Maybe she was avoiding him. Wirt paused. Why had he thought that? Maybe because of everything Alana had said? He could imagine her wanting to keep away from him after that, at least for a while. Or maybe he was thinking too much, and it was simply that she was busy with her school work, or with Priscilla, or something.
Wirt looked around the common room, and he immediately thought about going back to the room he shared with Robert. It wasn’t very busy in there, but there was the one person he didn’t want to see. Roland was there, standing with a group of students younger than him, apparently telling them tales of what it had been like facing the first challenge earlier.
“Well, I knew that I had to hurry across the first bridge, because I was sure the others would make it impossible to pass if I didn’t get over it first. They’d try, anyway.” He said that in a tone that made it clear that if he didn’t, Wirt or Spencer would have succeeded. Wirt didn’t point out that he hadn’t succeeded totally either. The last thing he needed right then was an argument.
Instead, he took a seat, grabbing a book from one of the shelves lining the room. It was a copy of Sir Gawain faces the Green Knight and Wirt started to read while Roland continued.
“The mirrors didn’t give me any problems at all. I knew that if I simply shattered them all, I’d be fine. It was the direct approach. That’s what works.”
Several of the students around him looked at Roland admiringly. Wirt shook his head and kept reading. He got through the introduction, getting to the part where the knight challenged anyone who wanted to try in Arthur’s court to a head-chopping contest. Wirt could remember Robert mentioning someone similar, and found himself wondering if it was the same person.
“Like with the walls and things I used to slow them down. It’s like the headmaster says, you have to go and take what you want in this world. You can’t afford to go around being nice. You have to be strong, instead.”
Roland was strong, Wirt thought to himself. At least, he had powerful magic for someone their age. It was almost enough to make him wonder what someone
like him was doing on the fringes of the elite class, really. He should have gone through easily.
The vague shape of something started to lurk at the edges of Wirt’s thoughts, but he couldn’t pin it down immediately. Instead, he kept reading, and kept listening to Roland.
“The squid was probably the hardest part, though obviously it all went pretty well in the end. It was just a question of seeing the danger and dealing with it rather than blundering in blindly.”
That was obviously aimed at Wirt, suggesting that Roland wasn’t so utterly wrapped up in being the center of attention that he’d missed him walking in. Wirt wondered a little about that too. Roland hadn’t been friendly since he arrived. Even when they’d first been roommates, Roland had been aloof, and had even taken those opportunities that arose to make life difficult for Wirt. At the time, it had seemed like just his natural arrogance and competitiveness, but now Wirt wasn’t quite so sure. It felt almost like Roland had something personal against him.
Wirt kept reading, going through to the part where the green knight tricked Gawain into accepting his challenge, using Gawain’s confidence that he couldn’t lose against him and then surviving the knight’s best attempt at decapitation. Wirt assumed that it had to be the same person Robert had mentioned, because he couldn’t imagine two people able to survive that kind of thing. Though he also couldn’t imagine why the green knight would do something like that; going around pretending to be weak just so that he could force knights to play the game he wanted…
This time, Wirt caught the stray thought, bringing it out and looking at it as pieces started to fall into place. The truth was that Roland should have made the elite class outright. Even the briefest of comparisons to some of the students who got through should have seen him in that group. And when he thought about it, wasn’t the same true about both himself and Spencer? People in the school were always saying what an exceptional talent for some branches of magic he had. Well, wasn’t the elite class all about encouraging that kind of unique talent? As for Spencer, no one in the school worked harder than he did. No one had taken more subjects, and he’d often done even better than Wirt had in the more academic classes.
